


Seeing What's There

by RedChucks



Category: Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy, The Mighty Boosh (TV)
Genre: Also starring the Luxury Comedy aliens, And the Garden People, And the tall attractive deer, Gen, Luxury Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 16:05:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19212850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedChucks/pseuds/RedChucks
Summary: Vince likes looking out of the window at the Zooniverse at night. It's never boring and sometimes he sees the most genius things.Mighty Boosh radio show era meets Luxury Comedy series 1 aliens.Written for the BringingBackTheBoosh prompt -Crossover/Mashup.





	Seeing What's There

“Howard, Howard, Howard. Howard!”

Vince was bouncing in his seat, flapping his hand to try and get Howard’s attention without taking his eyes off the scene unfolding in the scrubby garden. Howard, however, only glanced toward his new flat mate for a moment before turning away, scowling darkly.

“This better be important!” 

“It is!” Vince said, trying to keep his excited squeal to something close to a whisper. “I swear it is! A space ship’s just landed out on the grass an’ it looks exactly like my Nan’s old biscuit tin! Oh, I loved that biscuit tin, Howard! And now it’s come back to me only twenty times bigger with built in jet thrusters! Come on, Howard! You’ve gotta come look!” 

He turned, expecting to see a look of surprise or excitement or intrigue in Howard’s tiny peepers, but his mate still looked annoyed and gave him another short glare before looking away pointedly and not even glancing toward the window. “Never talk to me ever again.”

“But Howard!” Vince exclaimed, his eyes darting between the window and Howard’s face, sure that such a reaction couldn’t be real.

“I mean it, Vince, stop trying to distract me. Last week it was a woman screaming, possibly in peril, the week before that it was a hedge in the shape of a man coming slowly toward the window in an ominous fashion. I know you get bored easily but some of us can find more mature uses of our time than making up stories.”

Vince pursed his lips and sniffed. He knew what he’d seen last week and he knew what he was seeing now, and it wasn’t made up. Besides, he could read Howard better than any book he’d ever tried to get through, and after such a long time together he knew just where to poke. “And what are you doing again?” he asked innocently, leaning his elbow on the window sill and his chin in his hand. Ostensibly he was watching the pretty display in the garden and the shining, striped, space ship that was most definitely real, but he could also see Howard in the reflection of the glass, and took great satisfaction in seeing him look down at his desk in embarrassment.

“I’m writing my novel,” he said quietly, shuffling the pages to his left and re-centering the page in his typewriter - the entirely blank page. 

“Well maybe if you tried making up stories you’d have more luck with, ya know, writing a story,” Vince said lightly, still facing the window, smiling when he saw the jibe hit home, but stopped when he saw how snide and ugly his own reflection looked. 

He didn’t want to look like that, and he couldn’t actually afford to push Howard over the edge, no matter how he wanted to niggle at the older man until he gave up on the pompous act and revealed the soft, silliness that Vince knew was there. He’d seen it on his first day at the zoo, when his constantly angry, broom snapping supervisor had taken him to the pub for a celebratory beer (apparently they had been through a round dozen apprentices before Vince, and none had stayed for a full day). Howard had spent the night leaning on him casually and calling him ‘Little Man’ and waving his really very large hands about in an expressive and slightly sensual way and Vince had vowed in that moment to stick at his job at the zoo like he’d never stuck at anything before in his life. He reckoned he’d never been so happy but Howard seemed to regret letting his guard down and had spent months building up a wall of long words, pompous posturing, and jazz between them, even as Vince had spent those same months wheedling his way in to Howard’s heart and life, but Vince had won in the end, in a way. He’d wheedled his way right in to Howard’s bedsit after the accident with his own gaff, and they’d been going on adventures the last few weeks - proper manly adventures - and joking and talking and becoming like real friends rather than workmates or flatmates. He just had to stop his playful teasing from crossing too far over in to serious piss-taking. He wanted to see Howard’s silly and sweet side more, not his painfully vulnerable centre. 

Vince blinked at his reflection and absently fluffed his hair. That had been an awful lot of words to even think of and he needed to be careful about letting his brain run away from him, he didn’t want to get a reputation as a man of deep thought. He turned his attention back to the garden instead. 

There really was a space ship out there, sitting on the grass, glowing and twinkling like an enchanted circus tent, and as Vince watched, as wide-eyed as he’d been as a tiny kid with a giant blonde wedge waiting for Father Christmas, two aliens emerged, moving like they hadn’t quite worked out how their own limbs worked yet and wearing better outfits than Vince had ever seen aliens sporting in any sci-fi film. 

One of the aliens was tall and one was short and Vince immediately felt a connection to the smaller of the two, in his little silver tunic and leggings, looking around the yard like it was so wonderful, with a giant grin on his gormless face. But when his gaze shifted to the taller of the two, and to his outfit, he felt a rush of fashion lust run through him. The alien’s costume was like an homage to Bowie’s Ashes-to-Ashes and Vince was caught between a trio of desires - the first to run out to introduce himself to the alien and ask to borrow his hat, the second  to run to his sewing machine to begin work on his own Ashes costume, and three his desire to stay right where he was and watch the extra-terrestrial visitors explore the shared garden area that separated Howard’s tiny bedsit from the Zooniverse proper.

It really was like waiting up for Santa, Vince thought as he tried not to squirm in his seat. He’d spotted Howard in the window’s reflection, bent over a piece of paper and scratching away frantically with his pen, and so tried double hard to sit still - he didn’t want to put him off now that he’d begun. Howard wanted to be a writer so badly and was in love the aesthetic, which Vince totally understood and would never mock. Howard liked the idea of being a writer the same way Vince liked the idea of being a pop star. Howard liked the sound of a typewriter clacking and the smells of hot coffee and pipe smoke, and thought he needed those things to be a proper author but in truth the pipe smoke set off his asthma if he actually lit the thing, and coffee always made him gag, and his long fingers tended to get caught in between the keys when he tried to type too fast. Howard did better with pen and paper, a pot of tea (Vince had snuck it on to Howard’s desk when he’d been lost in introspection), and an empty bubble pipe, but Vince didn’t want to point any of that out. Aesthetics were important, it just so happened that Howard wrote more when he wasn’t worrying so much about looking like a writer.

He grinned as he looked back out in to the garden and couldn’t stifle the gasp that left his lips when he realised that the enigmatic Garden People has made an appearance, slow dancing near the garden furniture. He had a bit of a thing for one of the Garden People if he was honest, the one whose face was almost too attractive to be looked at directly, but he couldn’t say as much in front of Howard. Vince couldn’t point out anyone else’s attractiveness to Howard without the man becoming ridiculously grumpy, even if he went on and on about Mrs Gideon’s creamy skin and expected Vince to just grin and bear it. Some times Vince wondered if Howard’s grumpiness was a sign that he was jealous and maybe fancied Vince a bit, but he knew it was unlikely. Vince was doomed to unrequited pining for the foreseeable future, he reckoned, with no chance of ever being able to admit to it.

He was still genuinely amazed that Howard had agreed to let Vince move in with him, it was a single room bedsit after all and Howard seemed determined to keep Vince at a distance and ignore the sexual tension between them, but Howard was also a sucker for a damsel in distress and a good sob story, even if the damsel was Vince and his story was about his lighthouse very slowly collapsing in to the sea.

He’d been nervous asking, aware of all the ways it could go wrong, but he really had needed a place to stay after watching his beloved home disappear beneath the waves (it had happened so slowly he’d had time to remove all of his belongings but had still been left with a pile of records and clothes and no roof over his head). He’d called Howard, thinking that nothing would come of it but Howard had turned up with the Zooniverse van and a concerned expression on his face, determined to be the hero of the story. 

Most of Vince’s stuff was still sitting in boxes in the van, and in one of the zoo’s store rooms, because Howard’s hut was tiny and barely had room for Vince’s sleeping bag to go down on the floor next to Howard’s. Vince had been a little shocked that Howard didn’t have a proper bed because he’d heard Fossil yelling that he was providing Howard with a fully furnished apartment worth more than Howard’s legs, but knew better than to bring it up. Howard was a man with a lot of pride. All pride, no brain, as Mister Bollo always said and Vince agreed. He didn’t necessarily believe everything Bollo said of course because he also liked to say that Howard was a ballbag with a banana up his butt, but sometimes he said the right thing and was well wise. 

Bollo had been the one to tell Vince about the Garden People and even if Howard and the rest of the zoo keepers didn’t believe him Vince knew they were real, he’d seen them slow dancing under the fairy lights twice before and now the genius silver aliens had seen them too. Not that there was much chance of anyone believing him about them either. Still, Mister Bollo would be impressed.

Vince turned back to the window. Technically they were off duty and Joey Moose was on night watch - keeping an eye out for the elusive Phantom who’d been stealing the animals - but Vince didn’t see any harm in keeping an eye on things from his end. The Zooniverse was never dull, not so far anyway, and looking out at the grass and trees at night, listening to the animals, and watching the stars, had never failed to be enjoyable. And tonight he had the added excitement of seeing aliens in really genius outfits!

He watched the strange drama unfold, like a weird silent movie only in colour instead of boring black and white, and found his cheek pressed to the glass, hypnotised by the dancing of the garden people, the strange interaction between the aliens (he thought that maybe they were fighting but they didn’t seem to be cross at each other, it was more like a game and made Vince wish he’d had a brother growing up to play pretend with and make up daft languages with like the two strangers in the garden were doing). It was better than any telly show, Vince reckoned, and then, from the undergrowth, the most beautiful doe he had ever laid eyes on strutted out on to the grass and Vince audibly gasped.

She was slender and delicate and elegant and Vince licked his lips as his heart began to pound, then pulled away when he realised where his thoughts were leading. Shaking his head and focusing on his reflection in the mirror instead of the scene outside, reminding himself that he was a human. A human male. (Or at least technically. Vince took issue with the idea that he was only allowed to be one but didn’t know enough on the topic to really argue with Howard’s lecturing.) Naboo said that because Vince had the power to talk to animals and had grown up in the jungle without much contact with other humans it made it harder for him to see the difference between humans and animals and for his brain and body to react appropriately. Naboo had been so laid back as he said it, like it was no big deal, but Vince knew he wasn’t normal. Normal humans didn’t develop crushes on deer or lions or any other animals. Even if Naboo seemed to think that Vince’s interest in Howard was weirder, Vince knew that now that he was living properly in the human world (or as close as he could bring himself to it) he needed to act a little bit more like a normal human. 

He looked back at the scene in the garden in time to see the two aliens fighting again, this time over the pretty doe, and Vince jumped when the smaller one shot lasers out of his large eyes, freezing his taller companion on the spot. He turned back to the deer and moved toward her slowly, and Vince felt a tiny bit reassured by the way the alien seemed to be attracted the hoofed beauty as well. Then again the alien was an alien and not a human, so maybe it was normal on his planet to be attracted to animals of different species. 

A moment later the majority of Vince’s lust faded when he realised that the doe was wearing several of his prized Panini football stickers as decorations on her antlers! He’d been looking for those stickers for weeks, had been through so many boxes, and worried that they’d gone in to the sea with his light house, and was incensed that instead they were being used to seduce tiny silver men from outer space. 

He caught sight of his pouting reflection in the glass, as well as the top of Howard’s head, bent low over his paper, pen still speeding away, and felt his mind settle again. For all Howard was a worry wart and got them both in to mad trouble at least once a week, his presence still made Vince calm down, every time. He thought it might be something to do with the waves of Howard’s hair, and the way they caught the light, like the softest of fabrics, but he didn’t really want to pin it down. He was worried that if he analyzed it too much it’d stop working and then Howard would see that Vince was just as big a worry wart as Howard and they’d never escape from another mutant lab or underground lair of a giant mole king. Vince couldn’t be having that. 

Instead he looked back down at the garden to where the Garden People were slow dancing in one corner and the alien and doe in the other. They seemed to be talking to each other and Vince could just about make out what the doe was saying, that she had a thorn in her hoof, and watched as the small alien plucked it out tenderly. He jumped easily as much as the small silver man did when the deer deflated and stared with his mouth hanging open as she was re-inflated, but as a rubber safety ring!

A moment later the larger alien in the genius Bowie outfit unfroze and walked oddly toward his small companion, their former disagreements seemingly forgotten. Vince watched as they made their way back to their ship, reminded again of his nan’s genius biscuit tin. She had been great, his nan. She’d been one of the few other humans Vince had known before being shipped back to the UK and had been a sweet, doting, old woman. She had told Vince to find himself a home that was easy to find his way back to and reminded him of where he’d come from, so Vince had chosen the lighthouse he’d seen on the boat, the first building he saw when he reached England, and had hoped his nan would approve. He felt sure she’d approve of the zoo, and of Howard, who was pretty good at making biscuits and cakes when he was in the mood to. 

As he watched the strange pair disappear inside he felt strange sense of disappointment. He’d seen something wonderful and I one was going to believe him, and they were leaving with half of his sticker collection, then remembered suddenly Howard’s vintage Polaroid camera. If he could at least get a photo of the space ship Howard might believe him and realise he wasn’t just some simpleton that made up stories and couldn’t be trusted to live on his own.

He dislodged several older photographs when he grabbed up the camera but didn’t stop to pick them up, he was too busy snapping photos of the biscuit tin taking off, its jets reminding him of multicoloured sparklers in the star filled sky. He took a few pictures of the Garden People as well, for good measure, he felt sure that Howard would find them fascinating, and then turned back to pick up the photos he’d knocked down on the floor. Howard wasn’t exactly tidy but tended to go off if anyone else messed up his stuff and technically Vince was a guest in his home, so he picked up the photos and spent a few minutes going through them.

Most were from the picnic they had gone on a few weeks back and Howard had promised to bring the camera with them when they went away on holiday together in the summer, but the last two were of just Vince, taken while he was sitting around the hut in his poncho, reading a magazine and playing with his hair. Vince wondered that he hadn’t heard the camera, and why Howard would take photos of him at all unless...

“Hey, Howard? Howard? Howard. Howard. Howard? Howard! Howard? How-“

“This better be important, Vince!” Howard grumbled, looking up just in time for Vince to snap a picture of him looking studious and a little frazzled, like the poster of the Shakespeare guy in the ruff that Howard kept in his work locker. 

Vince grinned. “I just saw two aliens land their space ship on the grass and one of them fell in love with a really beautiful deer but then accidentally deflated her and blew her back up in the shape of a deer patterned beach ring and then they left again but took half my football sticker collection with them and the Garden People waved them goodbye!”

There was a long pause as Howard seemed to absorb Vince’s overflow of words and Vince watched closely, watching Howard’s lips twitch beneath his less than full moustache, almost smiling before he clamped down on it and shot Vince a glare instead. 

“Never talk to me again,” Howard told him warmly, “I’m trying to write my masterpiece.”

“Alright,” Vince shrugged, waiting for Howard to return to his writing before he lifted the camera back up to his face and took one last photo. He gathered up all the Polaroids and looked through them again. He’d pin them up on the wall, he decided, create a collage to make the place more like a home and less like a sparse little hut that they just happened to sleep in. Howard turned the page and kept writing and Vince glanced out of the window one last time before jumping to his feet with the photographs. There was a brighter, moving light, out amongst the stars, and Vince knew what he had seen, just like he knew what he’d seen in Howard’s eyes. His love might be unrequited but Howard definitely liked him better than he was admitting and Vince reckoned he could live with that.


End file.
